Business Interrupted. Now What?

Interruptions to the routine operation of a business can come from anywhere. Whether you are a large or small organisation, there will be events that occur that disrupt the ability for employees to be productive. These disruptions can be caused by anything from natural disasters to IT incidents to power or telecommunications outages and many more. The question is, how prepared are you?

While an organisation’s disaster recovery plan may focus on those core technology elements, data centers, critical infrastructure and systems; a business continuity plan takes a broader, organisational wide view on how to minimise, or prevent altogether, the impact to business operations in the event of a disruption. Consider a situation where IT systems are 100% available, but employees can’t get to them? They either can’t physically get to the office and do not have the ability to work remotely. How do they work?

Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity planning is a critical process for any sized organisation and provides a framework on how to deal with disruptions to the normal business operations. Here are some guidelines to consider when thinking about business continuity:

Build resilience into your business from the outset

Whether it's key IT infrastructure and systems or business processes; design and build them with disruption in mind. It’s always easier to include the ability to handle disruptions when you are first setting things up than trying to bolt on a fix later on.

Putting technology aside, consider also the workflows performed by employees to get work done. There are many business processes that only exist in the heads of employees. Critical business processes should be identified, documented and if possible automated.

Assess and Prioritise Functions for Recovery

When your business is disrupted, you won’t necessarily be able to have all services available. You need to identify and prioritise the key functions to allow your business to continue to operate. Ensure you take a wider lens on the business operations beyond just IT, what if employees can’t physically get to the office, do your key suppliers have a business continuity plan?

Consider the different ways your business could be disrupted and what the impact would be in the different elements of your business operations. Once you’ve identified the key functions and assessed the impact, you need to work out the approach to mitigating the risks for each of these. In some cases, the answer may be switching to manual processes, in others it could be a specific technology solution. Whatever the solution maybe, identify what the alternative mode of operation would be and build this in the business continuity plan.

Build the Plan

It’s imperative that a clear business continuity plan is documented and hosted in a location that is easily accessible by everyone who needs it and importantly, accessible from anywhere. There’s no point having the plan hosted on a server in the data center that you can’t access when you’re not in the office!!

The plan should include:

• Identification of key stakeholders and the chain of command when the business continuity plan is invoked.
• A clear communication strategy of how to stay in touch with employees, contractors, executives, suppliers. Essentially anyone who needs to know what’s going on.
• Processes for how key business functions will continue to be operate. This should also include the order in which functions should be enabled to ensure high priority services are available first.
• How employees and any dependent stakeholders are educated on the business continuity plan so they are aware of how things will operate.

And finally, business continuity planning is not a one-off exercise. It needs to be a live document that is always evolving as the business changes, whether it’s new systems or processes being added or even new business functions. 

Making Business Continuity, Business as Usual

Now this is the traditional approach to business continuity. It gives a business an alternative method of operating when a disruption occurs. However, being a different way of working, it needs to be maintained, alternate solutions may need to be deployed and employees need to be trained to work differently under this scenario. 

But why does this have to be the case. For certain disruptions where employees can’t physically get to their office, they just need to be able to work remotely. Why can’t this capability be built into the way they work every day. Why should a day when I work from home be any different to working in the office, at a cafe, at an airport, wherever? Conferencing services like GoToMeeting or Zoom mean I can meet and collaborate with people from anywhere. Workspace technologies like Citrix Workspace mean that I have access to all the apps, data and workflows I need to be productive.

Remote working continues to gain more and more popularity. And in some cases, it’s being forced upon organisations. Bloomberg refers to the situation in China right now as “the world’s largest work-from-home experiment” as organisation are being pushed to enable employees to be productive from home. A similar situation occurred in Australia as well with the recent fires pushing organisations to have their employees work from alternative locations.

Remote working not only provides benefits to the organisation by enabling employees to be productive from anywhere; importantly, it enables employees to balance their own personal needs with their work needs. Work/life balance is critical to driving positive engagement and ultimately delivers a better employee experience.

The way I work remotely should be the same way I work from anywhere. Remember, work is not a place, it’s a thing we do.